Community and Critical Psychology: Employment

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Community and Critical PsychologyEmployment

• Paul Duckett
• Room E48
• p.duckett_at_mmu.ac.uk

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Session Content

• This session
• Employment/unemployment/underemployment
• Social exclusion and social construction in
  relation to gender and disability
• Bonus if we have time!
• Analysing a film documentary of an office work
  environment

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Unemployment and mental health

• There is a positive association between
  unemployment and sub-optimal mental health
• Social Causation rather than Social Drift
• Cross cultural
• Cross ideological
• Cross methodological
• Cross epochal

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• Only a thin line today separates the unemployed,
  and especially the long-term unemployed, from a
  fall into the black hole of the underclass' men
  and women fitting into no legitimate social
  division, individuals left outside classes and
  carrying none of the recognized, approved, useful
  and indispensable functions that normal' members
  of society perform people who add nothing to the
  life of society except what society could well do
  without and would gain from getting rid of. No
  less tenuous is the line separating the
  redundant' from criminals the underclass' and
  criminals' are but two subcategories of the
  excluded, the socially unfit' or even
  anti-social elements', differing from each other
  more by the official classification and the
  treatment they receive than by their own stance
  and conduct.
• (Bauman, 200770)

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Task One

• Draw a caricature of an unemployed person

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The Size of the Community

• 60 million - UK Population
• 36.3 million - UK working age population
• ?? million unemployed
• Task 1 estimate the number of unemployed people
  in the UK

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The number of unemployed (UK)Sept Nov 2005

• Claimant count
• 909,100
• International Labour Organisation figure
• 1.5 million
• Broad Unemployment figure
• 2.1 million
• Slack Labour force figure
• 4 million

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The number of unemployed (UK)

• Slack Labour Force
• 4 million in Sept Nov 05
• New employment opportunities
• 230,000 Dec 05 (per quarter)
• Newly made unemployed
• 207,000 claimant inflow Dec 05

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The size of the problem

• Individual
• Family
• Organisation
• Community

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303040 Division in the UK labour market

• 30 The disadvantaged
• 30 The marginalised and insecure
• 40 - The privileged

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Under-employment (UK)

• 1992-1994
• 90 of the net rise in jobs had been in
  non-permanent, insecure employment (Trades Union
  Council, 1995).
• 1981-2001
• 2.3m full-time jobs lost
• 2.7m part-time jobs gained - 80 low paid (Ford,
  1995).
• 1994
• 37 f/t 77 p/t workers live below the Council
  of Europe's Decency Threshold (Oppenheim
  Harker, 1996)
• 1995
• Low Pay Unit reported 80 of job vacancies
  offering rates of pay lower than welfare benefit
  levels. (see also Fryer, 2000)

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Indicator of Underemployment

• about half a million people in the UK experience
  work-related stress at a level they believe is
  making them ill
• up to 5 million people in the UK feel very or
  extremely stressed by their work
• work-related stress costs society about 3.7
  billion every year (at 1995/6 prices)
• self-reported work-related stress, depression or
  anxiety account for an estimated thirteen and a
  half million reported lost working days per year
  in Britain.
• Health and Safety Executive (as cited in Kinman
  Jones, 2004)

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Social Policy (UK)

• New Deal
• Unacceptable culture of worklessness
• ltltltEddie Mair interview with the Schools
  Minister on PM (Radio 4)gtgtgt
• The danger is that the New Deal will do little
  to 'lift' the long term unemployed above the
  'churning' process they presently experience, ie.
  in and out of short-term periods of insecure or
  unattractive employment. (Mason, 1998184)
• Providing more job-ready people does not
  increase the number of jobs ready for people.
  (Duckett, 2002101).

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Ferminisation of the labour market

• During the 1980s the credit boom and the growth
  of consumption caused an explosion in
  service-sector industries, such as hotels,
  catering and retailing, which demand a lot of
  female labour. This explains at least some of the
  rise in female employment - although women's
  willingness, and often necessity, to accept
  part-time p.97 work with flexible hours may
  also be a reason why they find jobs more easily.
  (Hutton, 199596)

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Disability - Structurally Resistant Discrimination

• Yelin reported on recent changes in the nature of
  the labour market, where there has been a move
  away from physical jobs to more
  information-managing jobs. He suspected this
  would create employment opportunities for
  physically disabled people. However, he reported
  that labour force participation of physically
  disabled people was actually decreasing during
  that time (Yelin, 1991). Discrimination was
  widespread in the labour market even when the
  nature of jobs in the market was, theoretically
  at least, benign to people with physical
  impairments.
• (Duckett, 199884)

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Socio-economic factors

• Disabled people becoming more employable when
  unemployment levels are low

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Gender and disability

• Of those disabled people in full-time work, male
  workers earned about a quarter less and female
  workers earned about a third less than non
  disabled workers (Barnes, 1991).
• 65 - 76 of disabled women are unemployed (Fine
  and Asch, 1985)
• Disabled women are less likely to be employed
  than disabled men (Hanna Rogovsky, 1991
  Pfeiffer, 1991)

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A reason for discrimination

• Organisations dominated by members of socially
  privileged groups will tend to choose
  organisational ends that require the sorts of
  skills that the socially privileged more
  frequently have, even where the choice is
  unlikely to be a pretext for exclusion. A
  combination of disguised self-interest and a
  genuine belief in the universal significance of
  the aims deemed important within one's own
  subculture will bias decisionmaking sic. Biased
  decisionmaking will result in the ongoing
  exclusion of those who would otherwise challenge
  the tacit consensus about proper ends.
• (Kelman, 19911190)

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Context and self determination

• DOCUMENTING
• Taking into account the context of existing
  labour market conditions and socio-political
  climate (determinism)
• Taking into account individual agency
  (self-determinism)
• INTERVENING
• Promoting positive mental health
• Creating space and support for individual agency
• Changing the social, cultural, political
  economic context
• Facilitating the access of un/underemployed
  people to economic, social, cultural, political
  and symbolic capital?

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Ethics - Interventions

• Documenting distress?
• Intervention?
• Unemployment to employment?
• Doing the governments/employers job?
• Underemployment can be as corrosive to mental
  health as unemployment
• Underemployment to unemployment?
• Doing employers job
• Does nothing to improve employment conditions for
  those in work
• Unsatisfactory unemployment to satisfactory
  unemployment?
• Short to mid term sustainability in economic
  terms?
• Underemployment to satisfying employment?
• Improving employment conditions short/mid/long
  term

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University - resource rich?

• Academic staff
• Low staff moral and high staff burnout due to
  high work loads (Goddard, 1998)
• inadequate social support (Adeoye, 1991)
• poor pay and conditions (Bett, 1999)
• increased levels of anxiety, stress poor mental
  health (Ruskin, 2000 Fisher, 1994 Gillespie,
  2001).
•  Over 40 of UK HE academics are on temporary
  contracts (AAEU et al., 1998) 6 times the
  national rate.
• 93 of all academic researchers in UK HE are on
  fixed term contracts (Bett, 1999).
• See Kinman Jones, 2004 for recent survey on
  staff mental health

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University - resource rich?

• Non-academic staff
•  increasing student numbers causing excessive
  strain on university infrastructures and those
  who maintain those infrastructures 

• Accommodation
• Administration
• Catering
• Cleaning
• Building/grounds maintenance

• Portering
• Security
• Secretarial
• Technical support
• Library
• University shops

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If we have time.

• Your task
• Record instances of sexism, racism, heterosexism
  and disabilism

A documentary on a work setting
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References

• Barnes, C. (1991). Disabled people in Britain and
  discrimination. London Hurst Co. In
  Association with the British Council of
  Organisations of Disabled People.
• Duckett, P.S. (1998). What are you doing here?
  'Non disabled' people and the disability
  movement a response to Fran Bransfield.
  Disability and Society, 13,4, 625-628.
• Duckett, P.S. (2002). Community Psychology,
  Millennium Volunteers and UK Higher Education A
  disruptive triptych? Journal of Community and
  Applied Social Psychology, 12, 2, 94-107.
• Fine, M., Asch, A. (1985). Disabled women
  sexism without the pedestal, In M.J. Deegan,
  N.A. Brooks, (eds.), Women and disability the
  double handicap, Oxford Transaction Books.
• Ford, J. (1995). Middle England in debt and
  insecure? Poverty, 92, 11-14.Fryer, 2000)
• Hanna, W.J., Rogovsky, B. (1991). Women with
  disabilities two handicaps plus. Disability,
  Handicap and Society, 6, 1, 49-63.
• Hutton, W. (1995). The state we're in. London
  Random House.
• Kelman, M. (1991). Concepts of discrimination in
  "general ability" job testing. Harvard Law
  Review, 104, 1157-1247
• Kinman, G., Jones, F. (2004). Working to the
  limit. London Association of University
  Teachers.
• Mason, C. (1998). New deal with marked cards a
  critical analysis of the consultation process of
  the new deal. Local Economy. The Journal of the
  Local Economy Policy Unit, 13,2, August, 176-186.
• Oppenheimer, C., Harker, L. (1996). Poverty
  The facts. London Child Poverty Action Group.
• Pfeiffer, D. (1991). The influence of
  socio-economic characteristics of disabled people
  on their employment, status and income.
  Disability, Handicap and Society, 6, 2, 103-114.
• Trades Union Council. (1995). Britain Divided
  Insecurity at work. London TUC.
• Warner, R. (1985). Recovery from Schizophrenia
  Psychiatry and political economy. NY Routledge
  Kegan Paul.
• Yelin, E.H. (1991). The recent history and
  immediate future of employment among persons with
  disabilities. Millbank Quarterly, 69, 129-149.